On Saturday, I went up to San Francisco to see Cats and Joe Rogan (two separate shows, not a double bill). For lunch, I was at the Embarcadero farmer’s market. I didn’t buy much stuff, since I had a 12-ish hour day planned in the city and would have to carry whatever I bought on my back all day. I got a handful of apriums to eat during the day, and a small bottle of unfiltered olive oil, but I was mainly there for lunch.

Alive! is the live food stand at the farmer’s market and, after checking out their offerings, I went with the “burger.” It was smaller than a slider, with a side salad. The bun portion was a dense concoction, the burger some sort of almond pate, I think, with what can only be described as miniature avocado slices on top. I’ve never witnessed an avocado this small in my life.

I understand the idea that raw food dishes are oftentimes smaller, since the nutrient density is much higher, etc. But eating this strange burger, it reinforced what I haven’t been able to overcome on my raw food transition after 3 weeks: a lot of the food seems ridiculous to me.

I seem happiest when I am having fresh salads and smoothies. Anytime I try to make raw bread or somesuch in the dehydrator, it often tastes good. But, still reads as very weird.

So, as I expect, this burger is a bit off. This isn’t a new thing and often occurs with various homemade veggie burgers, as well. Basically, the bun is way stronger than the burger, so everything just mushes out the sides. From a consistency standpoint, it was more like eating hummus between two solid oatmeal raisin cookies.

All of these fauxfoods bring me out of the diet, and they are often so radically different from what they are poorly imitating, they seem to fail by a comparison they both create and fail to live up to. If you slice the “bun” thinner, and just made the pate more of a dip, it would probably taste fine. But, call it a burger, and you set expectations.

So, I thought about the plan that I think I’ve been gravitating towards anyway. Which is to stick on a plan of: smoothies for breakfast, salads for lunch, and whatever cooked thing (or not) I want for dinner. So, I weighed the options of staying 100% raw longer, and came up flat.

A lot of the benefits are hard to attribute solely to raw foods. I’ve been getting more sleep, going to bed earlier, but I’ve been off caffeine. I’ve had more energy, but I’ve been getting more sleep and not snacking on any junk at work. I’ve been losing weight, but eating healthier. I haven’t used any antacids, but I stopped drinking diet soda at work.

So, my plan for dinner after seeing Cats was to go to Millennium and have their raw entrée (usually an appetizer that has an entrée portion), but instead… I had cooked food.

I was slightly concerned that there might be some re-entry problems, things that one might not desire being away from home, or taking public transportation home that night, but nothing really happened.

So, anymore, two of my meals will be nearly raw (salads may have some bean/smoked tofu on occasion), and then dinner will be cooked and the final food of the day. Plus, it isn’t anything over the top. Last night, my dinner was a sauté of zucchini, corn, tomatoes and some basil. My non-raw dinners will likely adhere to the McDougall Maximum Weight Loss program, which doesn’t allow breads, pastas, oils, etc.

This seems far more reasonable to me. We’ll see how it goes.

Just checking in with a raw food update…

Starting last Monday morning, I’ve had nothing but raw foods. Minus a few pasteurized hiccups like coconut water.

The main reason for doing this was that my previous diet had sort of gotten too far removed from the purity it should have. I wanted my diet to be more nutrient dense, and not animal-free processed junk. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t even go to Millennium without needing Tums afterward.

I do think the biggest cause here was that when I started commuting to Symantec, I was tired out of my brain, so I started drinking diet soda. Once I moved to get rid of the awful commute, the diet soda continued. But even beyond that, more pizza and other vegan junk food had crept into my usual routine.

Rather than “moderation,” a word most people use when they’re going to pretend to take action, I decided to reset things with a raw foods diet. I never committed to doing 30 days raw, or anything like that. So, could be a lifetime, could be a week… I didn’t really want it to be a countdown.

So, the upsides to date…

There is something amazing about doing a green smoothie for breakfast. I prefer them very liquid and drinkable, as I don’t have time in the morning to chew-swallow a dense smoothie. A few days into the week, I tried a spinach, kiwi, mango, banana smoothie, and honestly, I’m hooked. If this how raw foodies have to suffer, no problem. I don’t need cereal again if this is an option.

Kale is OK in the morning smoothie, but it is definitely a denser, greener taste. Spinach just disappears, but still delivers a lot of great green action.

Lunch is always a very light salad. And the strange part is I’ve rarely had full-on dinners. Some days a handful of nuts and dried fruit, or some other snacking, but I’ve never felt like I needed more food. This is highly unusual for me, so it does drive home that the smoothie is delivering a lot of nutrients, because I normally had large dinners.

It is hard to judge my energy levels, since raw food advocates always talk about how much they have, since I spent a lot of the week coming off of caffeine. Technically, I could brew sun tea and be fine, and I know tea doesn’t upset my stomach the way the diet soda did, but I figured it was better to reset things entirely.

Some days, I napped after work. Others, I didn’t. One long day had me going to work for 8 a.m., up to San Francisco for a Paul Simon concert, home on the midnight train, and not going to bed until 3 a.m., so I can stay up if I have reason to.

Usually when I anticipated being tired, I sort of felt a mild yet constant stream of energy. Perhaps this is how much energy I have naturally, when I’m not augmenting it with caffeine. But it was interesting to give myself space to notice it, and acknowledge that it is enough to keep me going.

I stopped going to the gym, figuring I should give myself some time to adapt to this first, anticipating the headaches and low energy being an issue. That was probably unnecessary, and I’ll resume going this week. Perhaps expending more calories there will add dinner back in.

The downsides to date…

Most of the week, I didn’t have time to “cook” raw dishes, just eat salads and smoothies. So, this weekend, I remedied that with some flax crackers, as well as rye and zucchini flatbreads.

They came out fine, taste OK, but after so much time on McDougall, I don’t really eat a lot of sandwiches and such, so it seems odd to build a raw analog to something I don’t eat when I’m not raw. I’ll have to find some hummus recipe and just use the breads for dipping.

I also think there is something as far as the faux nature of it that doesn’t rub me the right way. It seems OK to spoof meat dishes people may have grown accustomed to and still like the mouth feel and flavor palette of, like a burger or chicken patty, and making a vegan version of that. But it seems strange to need to spoof bread, and sort of only reinforces how off the beatan path you’ve gone.

At present, I think I may take a Mark Bittman approach when this eventually plays out. He is vegan until 6, and then eats anything he wants. I may be raw all day, and then roll vegan in for dinner. But I’m not leaving raw for a few more weeks, so no need to worry about proclamations just yet. That is just the current thinking. There is always opportunity to revisit.

I think the lesson here is that the more I stray from the foods in their natural state, the less inclined I am to enjoy them. I bought the ingredients for some shredded Asian salads, which I should by all common sense be having in my normal vegan diet, considering how quick I am to order them when I dine out. So, it’s a good time to add that knowledge to the arsenal.

I think I’m going to keep arcing toward amazing raw salads and such moreso than the raw entrees. If I see one that looks interesting, I’ll try it out. But that doesn’t seem to be the goal.

I also think there is a case for making complex things to tart up salads, so the raw marinated portobellos that you can eat as a burger sound more interesting as a salad component to me. Again, the trigger point seems to be that when I’m eating a raw portobello mushroom between two pieces of dehydrated zucchini flatbread, that the diet seems a bit silly. The same mushroom sliced up in my salad, however, sounds amazing.

But otherwise, everything is fine with eating raw.

I think the biggest drawback is that I’m not giving raw a good comparison. I went from what I consider a lax slightly junk food vegan diet to a healthy, raw diet. So, you can’t say raw is better than vegan, because that form of vegan was off.

But I didn’t have a Tums all week, so there is that…

I don’t weigh myself, so can’t provide any numbers there. I think I’ve lost a bit of weight being raw, but I haven’t hit a point where I can be certain of that yet.

So, in any case, for the time being, the rawvolution continues…